[QUOTE=Perusing;4548258]From Protonmail:
Protected by Swiss and European privacy laws.
ProtonMail stores user data exclusively in European countries with strong privacy protections such as Switzerland. This means that unlike Gmail, ProtonMail does not fall under the jurisdiction of intrusive US laws (such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), and cannot be coerced into working for the NSA. With ProtonMail, you can be certain that your data always remains in Europe, in full compliance with EU privacy regulations. ProtonMail's approach makes us compliant with Article 25 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which mandates that services adhere to the principle of privacy by design.
From an article in Wired:
The Tricky Legal Questions.
This brings us to ProtonMail's legal advantages. As we've established, ProtonMail would have a hard time decrypting your communications, but the service is not so secure that it would be impossible. And while ProtonMail cites its location in Switzerland as added protection, it's certainly not a fail-safe. That's because Switzerland has a mutual legal assistance treaty relationship with the United States. These treaties require foreign governments to hand over to a requesting government any information legally available to their local authorities. That means that Switzerland would have to give the US access to any data that it could itself access. So if you're planning to use ProtonMail to sell steroids, leak government secrets, or engage in FIFA-style wire fraud / money laundering / racketeering schemes, Swiss law probably won't help you.
"People seem to think that data privacy laws in Europe or in foreign countries pose problems or would be a roadblock," says Victor Vital, a trial lawyer at Barnes & Thornburg, "but that's just not the case, because under those treaties the countries obligate themselves to cooperate as broadly and as much as possible. ".
Yen concedes ProtonMail isn't exempt from Swiss laws. "We have just intentionally selected the framework that gives the best possible protection to our legitimate users. The greatest protection, of course, comes from the underlying technology," he told WIRED in an email.
As mentioned, ProtonMail encrypts your emails to disk. Unfortunately, it's an open legal question whether a government could force ProtonMail to falsify keys or serve malicious Javascript to users.
"It is fairly standard for the government to require companies to turn over information about their customers already in their possession. The critical legal question is whether the government can compel companies to do more than that," says Alexander Abdo, a staff attorney in the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. But, he says, there's a big distinction: "There is an important difference between requiring a company to turn over information it already has and conscripting it into becoming a spy for the government. The latter raises serious constitutional questions," he says.
So Who Is ProtonMail Good For?
If you have high security needs, it's better to store your own key rather than outsourcing it to ProtonMail or anyone else. You can do this by running GPG from a command line. Using GPG with Mozilla's Thunderbird email application and the Enigmail plugin, or with a browser extension like Mailvelope, makes encrypting a bit easier and reduces the learning curve.
But if you have moderate security needs and simply want to add a layer of encryption to your email to protect against dragnet surveillance, or if you're living in a country that doesn't have an MLAT agreement with Switzerland, you might benefit from using ProtonMailso long as you use really good passwords, you're OK with only having 500 MB to 1 GB of storage, and you can convince your friends and colleagues to make the switch with you.[/QUOTE]Ok Perusing, can you give us some strong alternatives?
